Like-Minded Rivals Race to Bring Back an American Icon (American Chestnut)

By MICHAEL WINES
Published: July 13, 2013

FORCE, Pa. — Capping decades of research, two groups of plant breeders and geneticists appear to have arrived independently within reach of the same arboreal holy grail: creating an American chestnut tree that can, at long last, withstand the devastating fungus blight that wiped the trees out by the billions in the first half of the 20th century.

On 30 steeply sloped acres here in rural Pennsylvania, a thousand potentially blight-resistant chestnut seedlings are sprouting with thousands of other hardwoods planted in May by the American Chestnut Foundation, a nonprofit group in Asheville, N.C., dedicated to the tree’s restoration.

The seedlings, Chinese-American hybrids, are among 14,000 chestnut trees being set atop reclaimed Appalachian strip mines through the end of 2014. The deployment, by far the largest to date, is seen as a crucial test of the tree’s ability to go it alone in wild forests full of predators and other species of trees competing for sunlight and nutrients.

At the same time, scientists at the State University of New York at Syracuse are readying new trials of an entirely different chestnut — not a hybrid, but one that has been modified with a gene from wheat that enables it to produce a blight-fighting enzyme.

That tree has also performed well in early tests. With approval of the federal Agriculture Department, researchers hope to begin a controlled field trial at a different reclaimed mine site as early as this autumn, in part to test the tree’s adaptability to harsh soils.